What is CKAD?

Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (or CKAD) is one of many certifications provided by the Linux Foundation. This specific one tests if you can do certain things in a Kubernetes cluster using mostly kubectl and YAML files (but not only that). It's allowed to use Kubernetes documentation during the exam but the time is limited, so you need to do things quickly to finish most tasks.

Why did I decide to do the certification?

The main motivation for me was that I learnt the basics of Kubernetes at my previous job. I must confess that most of the time, I'd use a UI tool like k9s which is tricky because it limits using kubectl manually a lot. Even so, I had some experience with the CLI tool and I thought that it made sense to learn a few more things and get a certification for it.

I also run a small cluster at home, mostly but not exclusively for learning, and it's always good to know how to do things better. And the last, quite important bit, is that I didn't have to pay for it personally - it was fully covered by the training budget at my job, and it's not that cheap.

What did I do to prepare for the exam?

The CKAD certification can be bought on its own, or in a bundle with Kubernetes for Developers (LFD259) training, and I decided to get both (for a total of $595). I haven't spent too much time doing the training though, even though I feel like it'd have been helpful.

I also decided to buy a training on Udemy that is dedicated to that certification explicitly, and I finished the vast majority of that - I may have skipped a few episodes and some test exams at the end. I found it useful, especially since provides a lot of labs where you can interact with working K8S clusters and solve some very specific issues. And it was way cheaper than the official training (I bought it for like £17).

Finally, I did most of the exercises in this GitHub repo using a local cluster created with Minikube. They are split into a few different categories and require using the kubectl for all kinds of things which makes it a bit tricky at first but speeds things up by a lot once you learn some basic commands.

Final thoughts

I bought the certification bundle shortly before changing jobs, and I don't work with Kubernetes that much these days. That's probably one of the reasons why I kept postponing preparation and doing the exam for months, and completed it less than three weeks before the deadline (which is one year after the purchase). That was not the best idea ever, but thankfully it worked anyway. Next time I'll try to stay more motivated from the beginning and complete things as soon as possible.

The test exam you can take before the actual one was much more difficult than the final one. I failed it and I thought it was going to be the same later on, but it wasn't, and I'm really glad about it.

And finally, it was cool to see the results saying that I passed and to see the certificate with my name on it. It is the first certification for me and even though it's not that big of a deal, it still feels nice. Now I can do other things without that annoying thought that the time is running out.